Tag Archives: NBA Jam Tournament Edition

Get ready for more fantastic highlights from the basketball gaming community in the NLSC Top 10 Plays of the Week, curated by Dee4Three! New and old games alike are featured in this celebration of spectacular moments on the virtual hardwood. To submit your clips, post them in this topic, or hit up Dee on Twitter.

It’s clear that the community is enjoying NBA 2K25 so far, as it’s establishing a consistent presence in the NLSC Top 10 Plays. This week’s countdown features some clutch plays and poster dunks from the new release, but a handful of old favourites also remain in the rotation. You’ll find Dr. J operating in a work-in-progress ABA mod for NBA Live 06, a project that we discussed in Episode #547 of the NLSC Podcast. There’s also a long bomb from a retro showdown in NBA 2K14, some fancy passing by an NBA 2K13 MyPLAYER, and even the first appearance of the Gameboy version of NBA Jam Tournament Edition. Without any further ado, let’s get to the action!

What was your favourite highlight this week? Sound off in the comments below, and once again, get in on the fun by sending us your best plays! Remember, as long as it’s a basketball game, it’s eligible for the countdown. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to us on YouTube for more basketball gaming videos.

Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five basketball video games that are somewhat overshadowed by their immediate successors, or even predecessors.

As I’ve acknowledged in previous articles, “underrated” and “overshadowed” are relative and subjective terms, as are “overrated” and “overexposed” for that matter. They assume some level of consensus, and to that point, once we start talking about how something is underrated or overshadowed, it often ceases to be either. With that being said, when it comes to basketball video games, there are some that always seem to fly under the radar. Even if they were well-received at the time, they still don’t get their due in hindsight, because another title from the same era is more acclaimed.

This can easily happen in the annual sim titles when they’re at their peak. While there may be several strong releases during a series’ golden age, we tend to focus on the ones that always land on lists of all-time great basketball video games. It can happen to arcade titles as well, even when the games were released a couple of years or more apart. I hesitate to declare all of them to be hidden gems as they were popular, and it might be swinging the narrative too far in the other direction. Nevertheless, in my opinion, these overshadowed games deserve some more love. I would definitely recommend them to anyone looking for some retro basketball gaming inspiration!

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We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with some thoughts and advice on the old basketball games that are the easiest to get into.

If you’ve been around a while, reading my articles and listening to Dee and I on the NLSC Podcast, you’ll know that we’re enthusiastic advocates for retro basketball gaming. It’s not that we won’t play newer titles – and of course, the term “retro” is also subjective in that regard – but we love to revisit the classics, and encourage anyone who feels disappointed with modern games to do the same. Whether it’s a brief trip down memory lane or it becomes your primary means of hitting the virtual hardwood, there are many old basketball games that hold up and are still worth playing.

With that being said, some old basketball games are easier to get into than others. Needless to say, the further back you go, the more primitive the games, and everyone has a threshold as far as what’s too old to enjoy all these years later; at least on a regular basis. There’s also the matter of feasibility. You obviously need to be able to run the games, and that requires the necessary hardware, and sometimes technical savvy. There are ways to play pretty much any old basketball games that you can get your hands on, but some are definitely more accessible. To that end, here are my recommendations of where to begin if you’re interested in retro basketball gaming.

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at basketball trading cards.

As a young, newly-minted hardcore basketball fan in the mid 90s, I couldn’t get enough of the sport. I indulged this new love of hoops in a variety of ways. At school, I hit the blacktop with my friends as often as we could, with at least three or four of us bringing our own ball most days. I eagerly anticipated the Game of the Week and every episode of NBA Action, either staying up late or setting the VCR to record them. Obviously, I played basketball video games, especially NBA Live, NBA Jam, and World League Basketball. And yes, I collected basketball trading cards, too.

Trading cards, basketball or otherwise, are indeed still a thing. It’s actually cool to see, given that online resources and a move away from physical media in general easily could’ve rendered them an outdated concept. I haven’t actively collected cards in a long time, but in the early years of my basketball fandom, I enthusiastically bought packs whenever I could. There’s also a connection to basketball gaming here, as they were once handy sources of information when creating roster mods. They’re certainly nostalgic for many of us basketball fans, so let’s take a look back…way back…

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Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five players who retired after a video game’s roster cut-off date.

The roster cut-off date – aka the “accurate as of” date – is ultimately responsible for a lot of basketball video game trivia. Phantom stints, rare stints, unrepresented stints, player absences…it all comes down to the rosters being locked on a specific date as a game is being finalised for launch. A major trade or signing late in the offseason is all it takes to leave a game notably outdated, or indeed with a glaring inaccuracy, such as Michael Redd infamously returning to the Milwaukee Bucks after NBA Live 2003 PC went gold. Yes, I know I bring up that example a lot, but it’s a really fun one!

Needless to say, if a player abruptly retires after a game’s roster cut-off date, that also leads to a rather noticeable inaccuracy. When I discussed players who had remained active in games after their careers ended in real life, I noted that Larry Johnson was an example of such a player. While the other players I mentioned in that Five were still under contract and on the injured list when the games in question were released, LJ retired on October 10th 2001; after NBA Live 2002’s rosters had been set, and too late to be accounted for. Here are three other All-Stars, along with a couple of notable role players, who retired after the roster cut-off date and thus remained active in games.

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Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five brief stints that somehow managed to be captured in basketball video games.

At this point, I’m sure that I sound like I’m on a constant loop whenever I refer to basketball video games as interactive almanacs. I can’t help it; it’s a fitting term that describes what it’s like to browse the rosters in an old release! Of course, games will vary as far as being an accurate resource. If nothing else, they can capture some very brief stints – and in some cases, phantom stints that didn’t result in any official on-court appearances – which may not be apparent if you don’t know your NBA history. To that point though, they’re still fascinating glimpses of the league at that time!

In older games, between revised releases, ports to different platforms, and publishers releasing games at various points during the season rather than everyone aiming for a pre-season launch, titles set in the same year – and even different versions of the same title – could easily feature inconsistent rosters. To me, that’s only made those games an even more entertaining window into the past, especially when they preserve some brief stints! Those can certainly occur in games that were released close to opening night, but games that were released later stood a better chance of capturing an even rarer stint that resulted from a midseason move. Here are five noteworthy examples.

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at the timeline that led to the rosters and branding in the PC and PS1 versions of NBA Jam TE.

It’s interesting how many of us who grew up playing video games in the 90s can have different memories of the same title, depending on which platform we played it on. These days, multi-platform releases tend to be identical for the most part. Even when it comes to the cross-generational NBA 2K games these past few years, there are familiar gameplay mechanics in the eighth and ninth gen versions, not to mention shared roster updates and seasonal content. Conversely, back in the 90s, staggered release dates for the same title across various platforms led to interesting differences.

The various iterations of NBA Jam provide some fun examples. Depending on which revision was present in your local arcade, or which home port you played, you’ll recall different squads. These revisions and updates continued with NBA Jam Tournament Edition, infamously resulting in the fourth arcade revision including a cancelled trade. NBA Jam TE was ultimately updated through two NBA seasons by the time the final home ports for PC and PS1 were released, with that timeline leading to an interesting evolution in the rosters and team branding. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #532 of the NLSC Podcast!

Which basketball video games made you fall in love with the genre? This week, we join the community in reminiscing about the titles that got us hooked on the virtual hardwood, our go-to teams and players, and some of the special memories that we made with them. This includes sharing some stories about fake articles based on our seasons, and an unlikely comeback for a Boston Celtics legend during the 1995 campaign in NBA Live 95 PC! Speaking of the Celtics, we also share a few thoughts on the 2024 NBA Finals, which leads us to recall some of the underdog Boston teams from the mid-to-late 90s and early 2000s, and discuss notable moves and Draft picks the team made during their rebuilding attempts.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:16:38 — 53.0MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!

This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at the roster updates for NBA Full Court Press.

While Microsoft’s NBA Inside Drive series was respectably popular in the early 2000s, many long-time gamers may forget about its predecessor, NBA Full Court Press. It’s understandable, of course. Its name didn’t spawn a series of titles like Inside Drive, Live, 2K, ShootOut, and so on, and it was also exclusive to PC. Additionally, although it has its strong points and it’s interesting to revisit it today, it didn’t have the best gameplay or most well-designed modes. I’d suggest that Microsoft made similar mistakes with NBA Inside Drive 2000, before the series took a big leap with 2002.

One of the interesting aspects of NBA Full Court Press is that it was a 1997 season title that featured 1996 season rosters. A few years earlier, it wouldn’t have been unusual for a game to launch without updated lineups and a new rookie crop, but that approach had fallen out of vogue by 1996. I’ve previously covered NBA Full Court Press with a retrospective back in 2018, but the issue of its outdated rosters deserves another look; especially because there were actually some official roster updates that I neglected to mention! Let’s take a look back…way back…

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at basketball games that saw updated releases, and other unusual editions.

Official patches are a touchy subject in gaming discourse nowadays. Many gamers believe that games are released with less polish because they can be fixed post-launch with patches, including day one updates. Gamers have also grown weary of constant updates, especially when patches are often several gigabytes in size. These concerns and criticisms are understandable, and I generally share them. At the same time, it’s inevitable with games becoming larger in scope. Furthermore, it’s preferable to a time when games rarely received patches on PC, and never received them on console.

Of course, even before patches existed in their current form and were generally PC-exclusive, games did receive fixes and updates. From different revisions of arcade ROMs to a second run of discs and cartridges containing a newer version of a title, many games back in the day received updated releases. This included being re-packaged as some kind of special edition: classics and bestseller lines, compilation packs, and so on. To that end, there have been some updated releases and unusual editions of basketball games over the years. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five looks at five conceptual mistakes that were made with various basketball video games.

Game design isn’t as easy as some people believe it to be. Programming is far from entering instructions in plain English, with many technological challenges that must be overcome. It’s also impossible to cater to everyone’s tastes and preferences, and what might seem like a good idea on paper may not work out as well as hoped when it comes to fruition. For the most part, no one is trying to make a bad video game. It’s just that some concepts don’t pan out, there’s not enough time or adequate resources, ambitious plans set the bar too high, or perhaps a combination thereof.

At the same time, some basketball games have left us wondering what the developers were thinking when it comes to an approach or design choice. There may be some small merit to an idea, but it’s still bewildering that it survived the planning stages, or preliminary proof of concept testing. In all fairness, there are other ideas that seemed good to us as well, until the games were in our hands and we realised that it wasn’t quite what we wanted after all. These are the conceptual mistakes that held games back from being as good as they could and should have been. Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but again, a few of these examples were waving red flags from the beginning.

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Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five players who had single-season stints with the Detroit Pistons

So, this might seem like a weird topic for me to cover in The Friday Five! The Detroit Pistons are hardly the only NBA team whose all-time roster includes a number of players who only stuck around for a year. I’m also generally not inclined to focus my content on the Pistons; indeed, as a Chicago Bulls fan, it would be rather unusual for me to celebrate the team from the Motor City! However, I do love basketball and basketball gaming trivia, and it’s fun when real hoops reminds me of something from a video game, or revisiting an old title brings to mind some tidbit about the NBA.

While writing about my Minnesota Timberwolves Franchise in NBA Live 2003 for Wayback Wednesday, I noted that Joe Smith was on the roster, also mentioning his brief time with the Pistons. In the weird way that a mind that enjoys trivia works, I began trying to recall other players who only spent a single season of their career with Detroit, resulting in an often overlooked stint. Some of these players are bigger names than others, but they all have one thing in common, that being multi-year careers in the NBA with only one in Detroit. With apologies to fans of Korleone Young, that disqualifies him from this particular list, but here are five other single-season Pistons!

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #525 of the NLSC Podcast!

Which basketball video games have been the easiest and hardest to put up stats in over the years? This week, we join the community in discussing the titles that stick out in our minds, as well as the statistics that either eluded us or seemingly piled up way too easily. Additionally, following a session with Virtua NBA – an arcade release that a few people in our community have taken an interest in lately – we give our thoughts on what is certainly an intriguing game. We also provide an update on our journey in the original NBA Jam, pick our ideal hoops games for an annual tournament, and reflect on how it feels to shelve a beloved favourite that’s unfortunately grown stale.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:05:25 — 45.3MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!

From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #524 of the NLSC Podcast!

After feeling inspired to revisit the Super Nintendo version of the original NBA Jam, we were reminded of just how fun the game still is in 2024…and also, just how unfair it can be when the AI is determined to win and begins rubber-banding! Once again we draw comparisons to the NBA Playgrounds games, while a couple of interesting ratings led us to dive into some statistics from the 1993 season. We also join the community in discussing which ideas we’d take from other sports games – from modes and features to settings and roster customisation options – to improve future NBA 2K releases (and potentially, a new NBA Live some day as well).

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:04:05 — 44.4MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!

We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with a frank discussion of the harsh reality of PC basketball gaming.

I won’t say that I’ve never been one to engage in tribalism with my various fandoms. Back in the 90s, I was a Nintendo kid. That meant in my mind, Nintendo ruled, Sega sucked, and all of the blast processing in the world couldn’t convince me otherwise. In the Monday Night Wars, I was Team WWF, and outside of local indie promotions here in Australia, WWE is still my wrestling company of choice. When it comes to basketball, my allegiance is to the Chicago Bulls. While that doesn’t mean I hate every other team, there are absolutely a few that I’ve actively cheered against!

In short, while I believe tribalism makes fandoms incredibly toxic, I can’t claim that I’ve always been above it. However, one war that I’ve never taken a side in is the whole Console vs. PC debate among gamers. That’s because I’ve always played games on both, going right back to my introduction to console and PC gaming, the Mattel Intellivision and TI Basic respectively. Some of my favourite games only came out on consoles, some only came out on PC, and some – including basketball games – came out on both. PC basketball gaming is what our community was built upon, and I’m obviously a big fan of it, but there’s a harsh reality with the platform we must face.

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